NEW YORK
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
For immediate release: Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Statement by Barbara Dorris of St. Louis, Outreach Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314 862 7688 home, 314 503 0003 cell, SNAPdorris@gmail.com )
We applaud these compassionate men of the Horace Mann Action Coalition who are devising a system of rating New York private schools on how they handle child sex crimes.
For far too long, private institutions – both religious and secular – have evaded scrutiny on child safety issues. Many of these institutions do little to prevent abuse and cover up but spend lavishly on defense lawyers and public relations consultants when abuse reports surface. Many of them write nice-sounding policies but then ignore them.
We offer one caution, however. We urge the group to pay more attention to officials’ behavior and less attention to the formal, written abuse policies of these schools. Over the past 25 years, we’ve seen that such policies almost always sound good on paper but are usually ignored in reality. Most private institutions are answerable to almost no one. So they often not only break secular laws, but also violate their own stated policies.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.